I have recently bought a Lenovo G580 laptop and I am trying to install gentoo. This is not my first computer on which I install gentoo but this one is the most difficult until now.

The laptop has an Atheros Ethernet AR8162 and Broadcom wireless BCM4313. I downloaded the gentoo ISO but it does not support either of these network interfaces. So I downloaded an Ubuntu Live disk and installed gentoo from there.

Now I can boot into my new laptop but I still don't have any network.

Code:

ifconfig -a

only lists the lo interface.

I understand that both the Atheros ethernet and the Broadcom wireless BCM4313 are tricky. Would somebody be willing to write a step-by-step explanation how to get either of them working? The thing is, without internet it is difficult to emerge anything so I would really like to know which steps are needed.

What I already know:

- BCM4313 requires certain settings for the kernel. I have set these settings and recompiled the kernel

Code:

genkernel --menuconfig all

- BCM4313 requires "linux-firmware" - how to get this firmware?

- The Atheros ethernet needs the "alx" driver.... where to get? Does the AR8162 work with compat-wireless, as I saw in one posting?

About BCM4313 - it is really problematic and a very frustrating piece of hardware. If you stick to kernel 3.2 and earlier you can probably use the broadcom-sta ebuild which installs the proprietary module called wl. For smooth functioning in this case you should disable mac80211 in the kernel.

With newer kernels you have to use the in-kernel brcmsmac module. The problem with this module is that it is very unstable and there are frequent disconnects. To top this, it doesn't have powermanagement support either.

There is a third in-kernel module called b43 which you will find cropping up in google searches. Unfortunately, b43 does not support just this particular version - BCM4313.

I have a G460, and the machine is not only an abomination on Linux but has really crappy hardware. Bad drivers, bad battery, really bad touchpad, and heat issues. Apparently, it is impossible to have a decent low cost hardware.